During the run-up to the midterms, radio ads aired by a pro-Trump African-American group claimed that white Democrats pose a threat to black lives.

Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat / NYT / Redux

Last month, a super PAC called Black Republicans for the President’s Agenda sponsored radio ads in support of G.O.P. Senate and House candidates, in two tightly contested House and Senate races in Arkansas and Missouri. The fifty-thousand-dollar media buy, which aired on stations with primarily African-American audiences, aimed to convince African-American voters to support Republican candidates by warning of a return of Jim Crow-era lynchings if Democrats gain power. In the ads, two women caution that the Democratic Party’s support for Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process changed a “presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt” when it comes to sexual-assault allegations and that “white Democrats will be lynching black folk again” if they win the election. The women then say that Congressman French Hill, Republican of Arkansas, and the Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley, of Missouri, will save “men and boys” from the “bad ol’ days of race verdicts, life sentences, and lynchings when a white girl screams rape.”

Vernon Robinson, the co-founder of Black Republicans for the President’s Agenda, told me that he named the radio ad campaign after Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African-American boy brutally murdered in Mississippi, in 1955, after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, to warn African-Americans of the dangers they face if Democrats gain power. “The Emmett Till ad was inspired by the lunatic fringe rhetoric of ‘believe all accusers,’ ” Robinson told me. “This is very dangerous to black men, because, historically, black men die.” Robinson added that the warnings that women “will cry rape” would be understood by “all women over sixty-five, in the South.” The ads aired during programs like Steve Harvey’s talk show, which draws listeners around the age of Robinson’s intended audience.

Robinson, who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, joined the Republican Party in the nineteen-eighties, and switched to the Constitution Party this year “as a protest against the North Carolina G.O.P.,” he said. “The G.O.P. is more dependent on access donors and more contemptuous of the grassroots than they have ever been,” he told me. “That may make me a schizophrenic for supporting Republican elections in forty-nine other states.”

Robinson told me that, during his early political career, he felt that the Democratic Party’s approach on issues affecting the African-American community was too soft, whereas the Republican Party’s strategy of “shooting at the base” was more productive. He said he believed the G.O.P. was better equipped to solve, among other things, problems in the African-American community that he described as dependency on the welfare state, reliance on the public education system, and a lack of “entrepreneurial activity or spirit.”

In 1996, Robinson ran for state superintendent for instruction in North Carolina, the state’s top education post, but lost. He then served on the Winston-Salem City Council from 1997 to 2005. He considers school choice to be one of the most significant issues of today, and he lobbied for education reform and wrote the first draft of the House’s position on charter schools in the state. He also ran several times for a seat in Congress on the North Carolina legislature, but never won.

In recent years, Robinson has found his political stride as a fund-raiser and a champion for conservative policy and social issues. In 2013, he helped found a super PAC called the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, which raised over seventeen million dollars in two years. Robinson said that the left, specifically Antifa, has been irresponsible and has incited violence. He argued that the pipe bombs recently sent to prominent Democrats were not acts of violence because none of them exploded. “There was no trigger mechanism, the guy was obviously a nut. Bombs have triggering mechanisms, hoaxes have pipes without triggering mechanisms.” He blamed Democrats for the recent attack by a gunman in a Pittsburgh synagogue that left eleven people dead. “The left should be ashamed because of the Pittsburgh shooter, ” Robinson told me. “Ascribing the actions of a Nazi to the President’s effort to secure borders is not helpful.”

The Republican candidates in both races in Missouri and Arkansas have disavowed Robinson’s radio ads, and, even though they were localized to broadcast airwaves in the Midwest, the spots have appeared on news feeds across the country. Democrats have said that the ads are an egregious dog-whistle attempt to frighten older African-American women into voting Republican. “The racial hostility, the gender hostility, the caricatured, stereotypical black women they have on there—it is bad no matter which way you look at it,” Eric Ellison, a North Carolina Democratic Party official, said of Robinson’s ads. “It is too often that Republicans resort to lying, cheating, and inaccurately drawing people’s emotional strings.”

Democrats have complained that President Trump has made playing on fears across races a central part of his midterms strategy and made polarizing rhetoric acceptable to many on the right. As my colleague Jelani Cobb wrote last week, “Trump has both promoted and profited from the racial siege mentality.” Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate in the gubernatorial race in Georgia, produced an ad where he refers to himself as a “politically incorrect conservative,” and has said he has a big truck to “round up criminal illegals” and take them home. Several campaign ads sponsored by Republican PACs, such as the National Republican Congressional Committee, attack Antonio Delgado, a Harvard graduate and a Democratic candidate for the Nineteenth District in New York, because he was a socially conscious rapper who, among other things, criticized the Iraq War. “It’s degrading to women, and I’m personally offended,” one of the actors says in one of several ads paid for by the N.R.C.C.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, which took place shortly before the 2016 election, African-Americans make up only two per cent of registered Republican voters, and exit polls revealed that eight per cent of African-American voters voted for Trump. Robinson and other conservative African-Americans say that they can repeat the same level of African-American support for Republican candidates in the midterms.

The G.O.P. has relied on several African-American media figures to the help the Party achieve its goal during this year’s campaign. Candace Owens, a conservative commentator and activist, started the “Blexit” movement, calling for the mass exodus of African-Americans from the Democratic party. Stacey Dash, an actor, ran for and then dropped out of a congressional race in California as a Republican, but remains a staunch Trump supporter. And, of course, Kanye West said that Donald Trump’s MAGA hat made him feel like more of a man, then announced, shortly after, that he is abandoning politics.

The 2018 midterms results may show whether ads that play on racial fears are effective in converting voters from one party to another, or mobilizing them to go to the polls. Research shows that voters generally reject campaigns that make racist appeals, and, to be successful, they must tell a story that is counter-stereotypical. Robinson denies that his ads are racist. “I’m not going to box against a ghost. Someone has yet to convince me that these ads are racist,” he told me. “There are millions of black women that talk this way.” Robinson used what he called the “Nadler method,” influenced by the Republican consultant Richard Nadler, where “hard-hitting spots draw a stark contrast between Democrats and Republicans on particular issues.”

Radio stations in Little Rock and St. Louis reacted differently to Robinson’s ads. The station in St. Louis cut the reference to the reëmergence of lynching. The station in Little Rock that ran the ads did not change them, but local Republicans distanced themselves from the campaign. Hill said that he “condemned this outrageous ad in the strongest terms.” The Arkansas G.O.P. filed a complaint against the super PAC claiming that they did not register to campaign there.

According to publicly available funding data, eleven donors gave at least one thousand dollars in support of Black Americans for the President’s Agenda. Many were wealthy white benefactors and retirees, including Trish Duggan, a conservative philanthropist, and Charles Johnson, the principal owner of the San Francisco Giants. (Johnson issued a statement saying that he had “no knowledge” that his contribution “would be used in this manner,” and continued: “I strongly condemn any form of racism and in no way condone the advertisement that was created.”)

Another ad sponsored by Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, which aired in five markets, including Little Rock and St. Louis, supported pro-life Republican candidates and attacked Planned Parenthood. In the ad, a woman says, “The Democrat doesn’t care that black babies are three times more likely to die in abortion than white babies.” When Robinson received pressure from both states and national conservative groups to pull the ads, he declined. “The Republican brand has been destroyed, and the ads are designed to help people understand the brand, and that Republicans want to save black babies,” Robinson told me. Tuesday’s results will show whether Robinson’s and Trump’s race-based tactics succeed or backfire.